Jewish Life in Russia, Then and Now

David Rozenson, a St. Petersburg-born Jewish educator and activist, recently received an award from the World Wide Association for St. Petersburg Leadership in a ceremony at the Hermitage Museum. Rozenson spoke with a journalist about his experiences growing up as a Jew in Communist Russia and his return after the collapse of the Soviet regime to help revive Jewish life (interview by Baila Olidort):

As head of the Avi Chai Foundation’s office in the former Soviet Union, I met with many individuals, and rarely found disrespect toward projects that brought Jewish/Israeli education and culture into the public sphere, even in places where formerly anything that related to Jewish life was taboo.

Among the projects that I worked on, for example, we tried to help attain legitimate status for academic Jewish life. Following much back and forth, we came into a dialogue on the matter with the rector of the St. Petersburg State University, a university where my mother, as a Jew, was not accepted to study medicine in her youth. . . . After some hesitation, he eventually agreed to open a full-fledged Department of Jewish Culture in a university where one would never imagine that the study of Judaism could be a legitimate academic pursuit.

Many other projects, religious and academic in nature, drawing Russian Jews who otherwise never would have taken part in Jewish activity or acknowledge their Jewish identities, have since opened. Twenty years ago this would have been impossible to imagine. And consider the number of synagogues, community centers, Jewish day schools, programs for Jewish youth that have sprouted in Russia. True, the political and economic situation is difficult; we must keep our eyes wide open. But we must also be fully appreciative of these developments.

Read more at Lubavitch.com

More about: Anti-Semitism, Jewish World, Russia, Russian Jewry, Soviet Jewry

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF